Big bang breakthrough: The dark side of inflation

SUITABLE clients at Milliways, Douglas Adams's Restaurant at the End of the Universe, would have experienced six impossible things before breakfast. In the past decade or so, cosmologists have looked like they were halfway there.

Strike one: dark matter. Galaxies are whirling round faster than normal gravity alone can explain, so 80 per cent plus of the universe's matter is in a form neither we nor, so far, our detectors can see.

Strike two: dark energy. Contrary to all expectations, the universe's expansion is apparently accelerating, so the inwards gravitational tug of both normal and dark matter is being trumped by the effect of another substance so exotic no one knows for certain what it might be.

Strike three: inflation. After all that, the universe still looks rather less crinkly than we would expect, so it must have been smoothed out ...

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